First cousin marriages in Pakistani communities leading to 'appalling' disabilities

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Couples who are getting married should be forced to have a DNA test first to ensure they are not cousins amid growing concern about incest within Pakistani communities, Britain's first Asian peer has claimed.

Baroness Flather, a former Tory who now sits as a cross-bencher, said in the House of Lords that it is "absolutely appalling" that first cousin marriages in Pakistani communities are leading to "so much disability among children".

She said: "There are a lot of first-cousin marriages in certain communities, particularly among Pakistanis who come from the Pakistani Kashmir area. We know so much about DNA now, but there is so much disability among the children, which is absolutely appalling.

"You go to any such family and there will be four or five children, at least one or two of whom will have some disability. That is absolutely unacceptable, and if we cannot do anything about it, is it fair to the children?"

Generalizations generally work poorly, but there is a segment among Muslims who believe so strongly that Allah micro-manages the universe and everything that happens that they regard the idea that there are natural laws according to which the universe operates as a blasphemous contradiction of Allah's sovereignty. This could be a factor in addition to the more common ethno-cultural and religious tendency for immigrant groups to take a generation or two to start assimilating into and adding to the general culture.

That tendency is pretty common in US history/culture. My grandparents came to the US and became a part of a German-speaking sub-community in their area. They started a German-speaking Lutheran church that didn't have English services until 25 or 30 years after being formed. Or, another example, one of my kids married a person of Asian heritage. This was not anything unusual to Mrs. SVPete and me, but it took the Asian parents (who are immigrants) a while to be OK with that.

Facts don't matter to DUpipo.

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